How to use swash fonts in cricut

Using fonts in Cricut can be tricky, but swash fonts can be even more challenging. Why? Because those swash characters, a.k.a: glyph or long tail letters, can not be part of your keyboard. Because your keyboard doesn’t have enough buttons to cover all the alphabet with the swash. It would take you two keyboards to cover all the characters. And if it is your first time using fonts with Cricut, you may think the long tail letters are gone or have disappeared, which can be confusing.

In this Cricut tutorial, I will show you how to use swash fonts in Cricut. The best news is that I created a new way to use fonts with your Cricut design space application.

To recap, there are two ways how font designers provide fonts. We give a font and create an SVG file for the special characters. That way, you can install the font, use your keyboard to type the regular letters and upload the SVG file to Cricut to use the tail letters as an image. Some people like it, and others think the process should be shorter.

So I decided to create a new way to use fonts in Cricut. A method that simplifies everything without the need for an SVG file.

What I did was simple, instead of creating one font. I made multiple font files for the same font. In short, the new font I am creating will consist of 2 or 3 font files. One for the regular characters, including the symbols and a second font file for all the long tail letters (The swash characters).

Let me show you how to use the font in Cricut. It’s pretty straightforward.

I prefer to create the text and the long tail letters using a separate typing box.

1. Select the “l“, duplicate it and type “ove” because we want to create “love.” If you are on a laptop or a computer, you can right-click using your mouse.
2. Please select the first typing box to change it to a long-tail letter. 
3. Click on the font selector at the top and click on the second or third font box. These are the long-tail letters.
4. Click outside the font selector to see the letter “l” change to a swash character (the long tail letter).

To change the side of the tail: If you are on a laptop or computer, you can select that swash character and simultaneously push the SHIFT button + the letter “l” on your keyboard. The tail will change sides, left or right. And you can do it again without the shift button.

That’s it. Now you know how to use swash fonts in Cricut design space with a few clicks.

Happy crafting!